[Sidenote: The environment of palaeolithic man in Britain.]
Let us then try to conceive of the environment of those palaeolithic hunters of whose culture we have clearer indications in a late phase of the Ice Age, when the glaciers of Southern Britain had passed away. Then the configuration of the country was very different from that which we behold. The chalk ranges of Kent and of Picardy were unbroken. The Thames, fed sometimes by torrential rains, flowing rapidly and fitfully in the broad shallow valley which it was excavating, was depositing gravels on the slopes that bordered it, a hundred feet above the level of its existing waters,[88] and wandering far eastward across a plain from whose now sunken surface bones of mammoth and reindeer, of hyena and bear have been dredged, to swell that greater Rhine which found no outlet till it reached a far northern sea. Mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elks with antlers ten feet across, roamed in the forests; hippopotamuses swam in the streams;[89] brown bears and grizzly bears and lions and hyenas made their dens in caves, and dragged into their dark and sinuous recesses the prey which they had torn down in the open.
The earlier palaeolithic immigrants, impelled perhaps by scarcity of game, had crossed the valley of the Dover Strait doubtless from the nearer parts of France or Belgium; but the original home of the race is unknown, for palaeolithic tools have been found not only in this island and almost every European country except Scandinavia, but also in North Africa, in the valley of the Nile,[90] in Palestine and Asia Minor, the Euphrates Valley, Somaliland, India, and North America: as a high authority has remarked, they are ‘so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands’;[91] and the same may be said of those which were wrought by the Tasmanians, who, fifty years ago, had not yet been exterminated by the pioneers of Christian civilization.[92]
Many attempts have been made to calculate the number of millenniums that have elapsed since our Palaeolithic Age began and since it came to its end. Croll, the author of the astronomical theory of the Ice Age, finally concluded that that epoch ceased about eighty thousand years ago;[93] and Sir Archibald Geikie laboured in his youth to estimate the time which the rivers would have taken to excavate their valleys from the days when they were depositing the high-level gravels to the era when they reached their present depth.[94] But any one who uses his powers of reflection will see how many elements of uncertainty must stultify such a method as this;[95] and, since the cause of the Ice Age remains unknown, the calculations of Croll were futile.[96] Indeed, if it were possible to prove that eighty thousand years have passed since the beginning or since the end of the Palaeolithic Age, not much would be gained; for whose mind can conceive what such a period means? The wiser archaeologists have given up the quest of chronological precision; and they know that the imagination may be stimulated by more legitimate means. Go to Caversham and stand upon the gravels washed down by the Thames in his lusty youth:[97] one hundred and twenty feet below he is flowing now; think of the ages that passed while his waters were hollowing out that valley, which was as it is still before the Palaeolithic Age had passed away. Walk along the cliff near Bournemouth, and look out over the Solent Sea. That cliff was once a river bank; and even the cautious geologist who has described how Hampshire was wrought into its present form is willing to believe that man had then appeared in our land. Where you see salt water he would have seen dry land, bounded far away by a range of hills which linked the downs of the Isle of Wight to those that rise behind Weymouth Bay, and of which the Needles remain as lonely relics: he would have seen the Solent flow, a mighty river, enriched by the tribute of the Stour, the Avon, the Itchen, and the Test.[98] Ascend the hill on which stands Dover Castle, and gaze upon Cape Grisnez. Let the waters beneath you disappear: across the chalk that once spanned the Channel like a bridge men walked from the white cliff that marks the horizon to where you stand. No arithmetical chronology can spur the imagination to flights like these.[99]